


Proxy

by smilebackwards



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post Reichenbach, Protectiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 18:30:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/677501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I vastly underestimated Mycroft's capacity for guilt," John says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proxy

**Author's Note:**

> Late Reichenbach feels. Written for [this](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/15253.html?thread=81532053#t81532053) prompt on the kink meme. Basically Mycroft turns all his smothering brotherly love toward John.
> 
> Spoilers for Reichenbach Fall.

John used up the last of the milk two days ago and hasn't had the will to go fight with the Chip and PIN machines the way he hasn't had the will to shoulder through the reporters and flashbulbs camped out on the front stoop or turn on the television to hear Sherlock lambasted as a fraud, a picture of him in his deerstalker sitting in the top right corner of the screen with a watermark over it: FAKE. So when he opens the refrigerator to find a bottle of semi-skimmed tucked into the back of the door, John feels his heart shudder in his chest.

"Sherlock!" he yells. There's no answer, his voice swallowed without even an echo, and John tears through the flat, checking every sad, disused corner until he knows for sure that it's empty, hollow, like the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the space behind his eyes. 

_Stop being an idiot, John,_ he thinks. Sherlock never bought milk in his life. He's not going to start now.

There's not just milk in the refrigerator. There's takeaway from the Chinese down the street. There's cheese and cucumber. Red apples. In the breadbox is a twist of French bread, and when John opens the cupboards, there are boxes and boxes of tea, a full pound bag of sugar.

John can see now that it must have been meant as a kindness. A

_You've lost 4 pounds since we last spoke.  
MH_

or 

_I've made a study of your tea drinking habits. Based on the recent trauma, you should be drinking at least one cup per hour.  
MH_

But John can still feel the too-quick pumping of his heart, the last vestiges of hope fluttering against his ribcage like a trapped bird. It just feels like one more miscalculation on Mycroft's part.

John breaks the seal on the bottle and pours the milk straight down the sink.

\--

John's been expecting it for weeks, the relapse. He falls almost exactly where Sherlock did. 

There's a dark stain on the walk, surrounded by patches of too white, clearly bleached. John feels his leg go out from under him. He can see the bright bloom of blood haloing out around Sherlock's head and splashed across his pale cheeks, feel Sherlock's warm, pulseless wrist slip from his fingers to rest, limp, just over the edge of the curb.

John crab-walks toward Bart's and pulls himself up against the wall. He's considering his next move which is presumably to either fall humiliatingly yet again or, even more humiliatingly, call for help, when a sleek black towncar pulls up. 

The driver steps out, walks around to the back and pulls a cane off the seat. He offers it to John sideways, like a knight offering his sword.

John grips the polished cherry wood by its handle, stylishly flat-topped instead of a curve, and gives a curt nod to the nearest CCTV camera before crutching into Bart's.

He wants to thank Molly for doing the autopsy, wants to tell her that, for all his emotional unintelligence, Sherlock did think of her sometimes. John remembers Sherlock once saying, "Molly obtained the kidneys of a twenty five year old heroin addict for me," with extraordinary fondness. 

Molly held Sherlock’s heart in her hands, put it on a scale. John wants to hear her say that it was soft and fleshy, twelve ounces, large, not small and cold, hard like a rock. 

John remembers the way the swimming pool threw blue light across Sherlock's face, how his eyes flicked toward John, his features shuttered and then suddenly betraying. He wants to hear Molly say that Sherlock's heart was red and vital, almost warm in her hands. That it wasn't ashy and blackened. Burnt out.

John finds Molly in the lab. She’s wearing blue latex gloves, but she’s not working on anything, just sat at the bench, staring blankly at the darkened screen of her computer. John taps quietly on the doorframe and Molly starts, turning. She looks into John’s eyes and then down at his cane and her face goes gray, lips crumpling like wet tissue paper.

"Molly,” John rasps, “I just, I wanted…Sherlock did think of you," John says, ready to launch into a slightly amended version of the one kind thing he ever heard Sherlock say with regard to her.

Molly makes a sound like a mouse being trod on.

John can't bring himself to ask about the autopsy. It doesn't matter. He finds a transcription of her notes on the table when he gets home.

\--

Autumn creeps in over summer. During the months of September and October, John has collected a new stethoscope (single-barreled, non-chill rim), three cashmere scarves (royal blue, charcoal and teak), 42 cups of tea (delivered by courier every day at precisely two o'clock), and an expanded phone plan so that he can receive approximately twenty check up text messages a day about his eating habits/rent/lack of social interaction/etc. and have humiliating conversations like:

_Wear your all-weather boots today.  
MH_

_The forecast is sunny.  
JW_

_Also, I don't have all-weather boots  
JW_

_Hall closet. Back left corner.  
MH_

_...This is becoming a problem.  
JW_

_I don't see why.  
MH_

_That's part of the problem.  
JW_

_You're leaving without wearing the boots, John.  
MH_

_PROBLEM.  
JW_

John snaps his phone closed decisively and hunts through the closet, pointedly ignoring the boots in the far corner, until he finds his fall coat, sandwiched in between a police uniform jacket and a clear plastic tarp with suspicious stains. The coat is more cover-over patches than original material, and as John pulls it tight around himself, hunches against the wind, he already knows what he's going to find when he gets back to Baker Street.

He's not quite right, because the new coat is in fact waiting for John at the surgery, hung neatly on the rack in his office like it's always been there.

It's not like Sherlock's greatcoat, with its dramatic cape-like effect. It's short and practical, double-breasted and army green, epaulettes on the shoulders, but not something from military surplus. The weave is tight, expensive.

It's raining when John gets off shift, shrugging into his new coat. He looks at his thin-soled trainers, at the depth of the growing puddles, and sighs, waiting for his phone to chime an elegantly worded _I told you so._ Instead, four blocks from Baker Street, he gets:

_Turn right.  
MH_

When John turns, he can see Mycroft through the floor to ceiling windows of a coffee shop, sipping an espresso and inclining his head toward a cup of tea in front of the empty seat across from him.

John pushes open the door and brushes off his sleeves. The material of his new coat wicks the water away easily. 

As he approaches the table, his shoes make distressing squelching noises. Mycroft looks at them blandly. "All right, yes. You were right," John says tiredly, dropping into the empty chair.

"It's not that I take pleasure in it," Mycroft says, nudging the tea closer to John when he doesn't reach for it immediately. "Well, perhaps a little," he concedes to John's incredulously raised eyebrow. "But, really, my primary goal is to keep you happy and healthy, John. I don't understand why you won't listen to me."

John doesn't know how to say that he doesn't really want to be taken care of. He's always been the practical one, the even keel. He wants Sherlock's madness and adventure, the chance to run through the back streets of London and almost fall into the Thames, to be woken up at half four in the morning by the blaring of the smoke alarm and Sherlock's shouts of eureka. This reintroduction of structure to his life, all the path smoothing Mycroft provides, makes him feel like he's back in his post-Afghanistan bedsit, the colorless walls closing in on him.

John shakes his head. He doesn't know how to explain without sounding ungrateful, and he is, in a way, terribly grateful, to be remembered even in Sherlock's absence, to be given tea at regular intervals and checked for cracks, so he just sips his Earl Grey and when he gets up to leave he says, "Thanks for this," turning up the collar of his new coat. It's still raining like mad outside.

Mycroft's hand twitches alarmingly.

" _No,_ " John says, because there has to be a line somewhere. "Don't even _think_ about giving me your umbrella."

\--

"Oh good God," John says when he opens the door to Anthea holding a pet carrier in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other.

"Mycroft thinks you need companionship," Anthea says, her head down over her BlackBerry. She hands the carrier to John. "His name is Gladstone."

John looks between the thin iron bars caging the front of the carrier. A bull pup stares back with huge, sad eyes. "I vastly underestimated Mycroft's capacity for guilt," John says.

"Hmm," Anthea acknowledges, tapping away at her BlackBerry with her thumbs now that both her hands are free. 

"I don't know that Mrs. Hudson allows pets," John says, although he suspects she'd allow him just about anything right now. John hasn't been doing a good job of pretending not to be fragile. People reach out to touch him and flinch away at the last moment, like they're afraid he'll shatter. 

"Don't worry," Anthea says. "Her internet history consists almost solely of hits to your blog, the NHS webpage about hip issues, and a tumblr that puts out at least three new pictures of puppies every hour."

"You _hack_ Mrs. Hudson's internet history?" John says.

"Hmm," Anthea replies. 

\--

John has good days; days where he takes Gladstone to the park, speaks more than twelve words to his therapist, and pretends that he can still function as a normal human being. 

Then John has days like this.

It's half ten in the morning and he's already seen Sherlock twice: the dark curls of the back of his head through a second story window at Bart's, the tail of his coat swishing around the corner of a building. John counts it as progress that he didn't chase the apparitions, that he refocused his eyes, kept moving. 

Now, there's the red bullet of a sniper sight lit up on his shoulder, directly over John's old wound. John doubts he'd survive being shot a second time. He’s in the middle of London and it’s unlikely that the people around him—happy, shopping hanging from their wrists—would have pressure bandages to hold against his shoulder, morphine for the shock of the pain. More than that, he feels fragile, old, wounded already. This time John wouldn't pray, wouldn't ask, _please, God, let me live._

John tries to brush the red dot away like its lint or a crumb, but it's surprisingly difficult to reverse trick a trick of the mind.

One of Mycroft’s black cars pulls up to the curb and John wonders what Mycroft will give him this time, perhaps haloperidol or clozapine or the offer of a restful month at whatever facility Sherlock was locked in for detox. The laser sight has disappeared from John’s shoulder, like the angle’s been blocked by the car.

When the back door opens, John’s surprised to see that it’s Mycroft himself. “Get inside,” Mycroft says, voice flat. “ _John,_ get inside.”

John ducks inside willingly. Mycroft doesn’t offer him anything, not pills or doctors or gentling. His hands are empty, clenched.

They ride in silence until the car pulls up to Baker Street and John moves to get out. Mycroft makes a sound like an aborted word and then turns it into a throat clearing. John looks at him keenly. It’s not that he feels entitled; it’s just the repeating pattern, their strange new ritual. “Was there something you wanted to give me?” John asks.

“Just a ride home,” Mycroft says, quiet.

\--

The flats a block to the left of John’s favorite Ethiopian takeout place have become a crime scene.

John knows he should keep walking, keep his head down, eyes averted. There’s no reason for him to be there anymore and there’s no telling what he’ll do if it’s the kind of crime with a body, blunt trauma to the head, but he finds himself drawn in by the flashing lights of the squad cars all the same, muscle memory.

It takes all John has not to duck beneath the yellow police tape. He waits for Lestrade to come out of the building and walk to him, DO NOT CROSS standing between them like razorwire.

Lestrade stares at John for a long moment before he says, "Want to have a look?" and lifts the tape for John to come through. "You always had a good eye, and you knew Sherlock's thought process better than anyone."

John wants to deny it, because he still doesn't understand, God, the most important thing, doesn't know what Sherlock was thinking that made him jump, made his last words to John a lie. But then they're in a small, tidy flat with a dead body on the floor and, two and a half minutes later, John knows this answer, easy as if it was writ in neon on the wall.

Sherlock once did a set of experiments with a drug John doesn't remember the name of. About sixteen syllables, half of them repeating. Benzinehydrochloridehydrooxidechlorine or something else ridiculous. One of the many things Sherlock had discovered was that, when dissolved in liquid, the poison left a faint blue tinge and an almost imperceptible oily sheen. He'd made John practice detecting it in his tea using a non-poisonous version, the reagent taken out, sweetly and obsessively concerned for John's safety in his own mad way.

It's in the tea Samantha Jackson was drinking. Her lips are brushed with a tinge of blue from the poison rather than cyanosis. The box of tea on her kitchen table is English Breakfast, nothing exotic.

John doesn't know why he doesn't point it out to Lestrade. He points out lesser clues instead: the undignified position of the body, the absence of a note. It’s what people do. Fall gracefully. Explain.

He tries to work himself up to it when they go for dinner at the pub, fake a revelation, but, really, John knew what he was going to do the moment he saw the tea. Run off half-cocked toward danger, heady with adrenaline, breathless with the remnants of Sherlock's cleverness. His fingers itch for the grip of his gun.

John buys Lestrade a drink. He has a tab here but whenever he tries to settle it, it’s always already paid in full. 

Sally trailed them to the pub. She orders a pint and sits to the far left, Lestrade a buffer between her and John. Even then, she's sitting a little farther from Lestrade than she would have otherwise. There are cracks between all of them.

John doesn't know how to tell her that even though he hasn't quite found it in him to forgive her, he does, at the least, understand. It's her job to investigate reasonable doubt. John has always been good at faith, at faithfulness, but he knows some people find it difficult. 

\--

A new laptop was delivered to 221B three days before John’s old Dell came down with the blue screen of death. Its processor moves at lightning speed and John flashes through Google searches, news articles, government webpages he’s sure he shouldn’t have access to.

John puts the pieces together. Lestrade's sixty-second biographical sketch of Samantha Jackson went like this: thirty-four, teacher, having an affair with a married stockbroker. Family: one brother, younger, both parents retired, clearly gutted by the death of their only daughter. 

It wasn't suicide. Murder, then. Poison is traditionally considered a woman's weapon, but everyone knows that. The killer's tried to be clever. A man. Trusting the police to find out about Samantha's affair with a married man, to look at the wife, a bitter, poisonous personage the husband wanted to escape.

Samantha Jackson's brother is a biological researcher, close enough to chemicals without it being explicit in his job title. John tries to think of reasons he might kill Harry, but it's an intensely short list. He can think of a great many reasons Sherlock might have attempted to kill Mycroft—some of them John now might even consider almost justified, and all of them sure to have been utterly failed attempts—but they're not the kind of motives that can be crossed over to the average person.

Adam Jackson lives outside his means, has a Ferragamo suit and a Submariner watch and looks covetously at every Bentley that drives past. The parents are extremely wealthy, aging, but not yet infirm. Really a very cold, calculated plan, John thinks. Set up years in advance of what anyone would consider motive. John suspects at least one of the healthy parents may become ill with grief, a domino effect of poison leading to a substantial inheritance.

One of Sherlock’s stolen warrant cards would be handy. Usually there are upwards of three on the mantle, but the last drugs bust had been just a week before Sherlock's death and Lestrade had repoed them with a sigh. 

Still, when John knocks on Adam’s front door and asks about his sister he doesn't need to flash a card. He's always been the kind of person people invite in for tea, even when he's carrying a gun against his back.

“Nice place,” John says, looking around at the rosewood furniture, the single malt on the sidebar, as Adam closes the door behind him. Adam blanches.

John doesn’t think he tipped his hand. It was the kind of innocuous comment anyone might have made. But maybe it’s just the paranoia of a guilty conscience, a telltale heart beating beneath the floorboards. Adam rushes him.

It’s the surprise that gets John. Well, the surprise and the corner of the coffee table. The room swims in front of him and he’s barely conscious enough to take the set of police issue handcuffs that he’d borrowed from one of the posts of Sherlock's huge four-poster, it's ridiculous breadth taking up half the bedroom, and cuff Adam to the gold-plated stair railing before he speed dials Mycroft and passes out.

\--

John wakes up on his back in a hospital bed, Mycroft staring down at him.

Mycroft's face shows actual human expression, something eerily reminiscent of an oddly-shaped emotion Sherlock had once turned on John when he'd carefully disposed of one of Sherlock's more biologically hazardous experiments to avoid the possibility of getting radiation poisoning. 

"The levels were acceptably low, John," Sherlock had reproached, staring balefully into the bin. Then, somehow even more disappointed, "I'd never let anything hurt you." 

John had shot people and felt less like a terrible human being.

Mycroft's hair is mussed on one side and the left lapel on his jacket is creased, folded under. On anyone else it would mean five o'clock, time to pack up the briefcase and leave the office. On Mycroft, it indicates that he probably broke the sound barrier getting here. Something in his posture, in his umbrella-less hands, makes John feel like a trial, like he is somehow the most difficult thing in Mycroft's day full of quashing dictators and salvaging the flagging economy.

John's IV is hooked up to a bag of fluid. Mycroft eyes the needle in John's arm too obviously and John remembers the scatter of faded track marks in the crook of Sherlock's elbow. He doesn't think he set out to get back at Mycroft, but John's therapist once wrote _doesn't understand own motivations_ beneath _trust issues_ and he supposes it might occasionally be true. "I didn't do this to myself on purpose," he says.

"I don't know what else you could have possibly meant to do," Mycroft says. "You fobbed off the police, slipped your watchers, and took an illegal firearm to confront a man you believed guilty of murder. Truly, John, what did you expect to happen?"

"Mostly I just wanted to know if I was right," John says. "People are less likely to confess in front of loads of police and government agents, and more likely to confess with a gun in their face."

“Because the things people say under duress are so often _completely_ reliable,” Mycroft says, deadpan.

John glares. “Obviously I’d have needed him to tell me details from the investigation that hadn’t been released before things went any further.” 

“You spent far too much time with my brother,” Mycroft says and John flinches back because it’s all he can think about now, how little time he and Sherlock got, how terribly inadequate, two years in a lifetime. “Forgive me,” Mycroft says quietly, face pale. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I know,” John says, peeling the paper tape holding his IV in place off the underside of his forearm and pulling out the needle. “It’s one year today,” he says. “I suppose I meant it as a sort of homage.”

“Yes,” Mycroft says. “Well.” He hands John a pair of new but softly worn in jeans and a pullover to change into. John checks himself out against medical advice and Mycroft shepherds him to the parking garage and the usual black car. John can feel the lingering aftereffects of diazepam and it takes him until their actual destination to realize Mycroft isn’t taking him directly back to Baker Street.

The car crunches to a stop on gravel and John looks out the window, at the rows of silent headstones. 

John and Mycroft walk to Sherlock’s grave. John stares at it. The polish is so high he can see his reflection with perfect clarity. He watches Mycroft’s hand hover over his shoulder before diverting into the inner lining of his suit jacket.

Mycroft holds out a blue rose. "You're always giving me things," John says, taking the flower. Sherlock never showed much appreciation for non-poisonous herbage, but John thinks it's the kind of thing he'd have liked, elegant and out of the ordinary.

"Yes," Mycroft says.

John lays the flower on Sherlock's grave. "Thanks," he says.


End file.
